Interviewed by Stacey Schmeidel for the Spring 1999 issue of Amherst Magazine, David Foster Wallace said, “The truth is I don’t think I’ve ever found anything as purely ‘moving’ as the end of The Velveteen Rabbit when I first read it.”

“I think what preoccupies me is transition, that zone between one place of relative stasis to another, in particular how we act, or react, when we don’t know what will happen next. Or, put another way: during moments when external circumstances throw us into crisis or flux, what do we do?”

To Californians, England is a culture of understatement. To the English, California is a culture of overstatement. But from a more global perspective, both cultures are rather on the understated side of things.

There are TV shows that, if you just watch whatever episode happens to be on the air right now, might strike you as kind of gratuitous — but if you watch the episodes in sequence and in the right spirit, turn out to have literary depth.